Monday, August 12, 2019

CenturyLink announced a several hundred-million-dollar investment to build out and support edge compute services.

The initiative calls for more than 100 initial edge compute locations across the U.S., and providing a range of hybrid cloud solutions and managed services. Edge locations are designed for high performance, low-latency networking with leading cloud service provider platforms in customized configurations. CenturyLink said its global fiber network with edge facilities will enable businesses and government agencies to serve their local locations within 5 milliseconds of latency.

"Customers are increasingly coming to us for help with applications where latency, bandwidth and geography are critical considerations," said Paul Savill, senior vice president, product management, CenturyLink. "This investment creates the platform for CenturyLink to enable enterprises, hyperscalers, wireless carriers, and system integrators with the technology elements to drive years of innovation where workloads get placed closer to customers' digital interactions."

Highlights from CenturyLink

CenturyLink currently connects to over 2,200 public and private datacenters and over 150,000 on-net, fiber-fed enterprise buildings.

CenturyLink's robust fiber network is one of the most deeply peered and well-connected in the world, with over 450,000 route-miles of coverage.

CenturyLink is expanding access to its services by expanding network colocation services in many key markets to enable customers and partners to run distributed IT workloads close to the edge of the network.

Sunday, August 11, 2019

CenturyLink will provide secure cloud connectivity to the U.S. Census Bureau supporting the 2020 census.

Under the contract, CenturyLink will help digitize the 2020 Census by providing the Census Bureau with Managed Trusted Internet Protocol Services (MTIPS) at speeds of 40 Gbps or higher. The Census Bureau task order runs from July 2019 until the end of December 2020 and was awarded via the General Services Administration's Networx Universal contract.

CenturyLink said its highly secure, reliable and scalable MTIPS infrastructure capable of detecting and defending against aggressive network attacks while meeting or exceeding the federal government's strict network standards and requirements.

"Our high-speed MTIPS service will provide the Census Bureau with secure connectivity that enables it to move its 2020 Census to an online digital platform and carry out its important data-gathering mission in the most secure, reliable and cost-effective way," said David Young, CenturyLink senior vice president, strategic government. "We're eager to help the 2020 Census become the first to be completed largely online, with about half of all American households expected to submit their responses digitally."

Tuesday, July 23, 2019

CenturyLink announced a significant expansion of its inter-city multi-conduit infrastructure with plans to add 4.7 million miles of fiber in North America and parts of Europe.

The first phase of this overbuild fiber network, completed in June, connects more than 50 major cities throughout the U.S. The expansion leveraged the multi-conduit infrastructure all ready in place. The second phase of this expansion will include areas in Europe and will be completed by early 2021.

The project uses Corning's SMF-28 ULL fiber and SMF-28 Ultra fiber in a hybrid Corning SST-UltraRibbon cable. With a silica core design, SMF-28 ULL fiber offers the lowest loss of any terrestrial-grade optical fiber and will provide the CenturyLink network with a boost in optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) which can extend optical reach at very high data rates.

CenturyLink said the added capacity will further improve the scalability of the network to meet the high bandwidth demands of emerging technologies and applications such as 5G, augmented reality, high-definition video streaming and the Internet of Things.

"Our newly built intercity fiber network, created with the latest optical technology, is another example of how our diverse fiber assets differentiate us from other network providers," said Andrew Dugan, CenturyLink chief technology officer. "Our multi-conduit infrastructure has a significant amount of capacity for supporting the growing demand for fiber and will allow us to quickly and cost effectively deploy new fiber technology now and in the future. This uniquely positions CenturyLink to meet the needs of companies seeking highly reliable, low-latency network infrastructure designed to move massive amounts of data."

"A next-generation network requires next-generation optical infrastructure, and we believe Corning's fiber and cable innovations will enable CenturyLink and its customers to unlock the opportunities presented by the Internet of Things and other transformative technologies," said Dr. Bernhard Deutsch, vice president and general manager, Corning Optical Fiber and Cable. "With the expanded optical reach and capacity provided by our ultra-low-loss fiber, CenturyLink will magnify the capabilities of their expansive, scalable fiber network."

Andrew Dugan, SVP Technology Planning & Network Architecture, CenturyLink says it is vital to understand that customers are undergoing transformations of their own. Enterprise applications are getting distributed into multiple clouds. Some workloads stay in private data centers and others are moved into hybrid or public clouds. Carriers, like CenturyLink, must provide networking services that are equally as dynamic as the service offered by cloud providers.

CenturyLink is developing products that allow for dynamic service creation. This allows for new connections to be set-up, capacity to be scaled, and VLANs to be controlled.

Another area of interest is MEF's LSO (lifecycle service orchestration) APIs for enabling dynamic services across carriers to public clouds. CenturyLink is heavily supporting MEF's efforts in this area.

Monday, June 24, 2019

CenturyLink has begun offering Cloud Connect Dynamic Connections to Microsoft Azure and Azure Government. The service offers secure connections as a private Layer 2 network. Customers can do real-time turn up and turn downs of private Ethernet connections to cloud service providers via a dynamic self-service portal or API. This usage-based model enables enterprises to consume bandwidth in the same way they are used to consuming cloud services.

Resiliency is included in every Dynamic Connection using Azure via redundant virtual circuits, thanks to advanced connectivity capabilities of CenturyLink Dynamic Connections and Microsoft ExpressRoute. CenturyLink also offers Dynamic Connections in separate physical facilities for popular locations such as Washington, D.C. This allows customers to create even more resiliency while having similar latency performance for their Azure ExpressRoute connections.

"With this addition of Microsoft Azure, CenturyLink can now directly connect to approximately 70% of the desired destinations for all public cloud market users," said Paul Savill, senior vice president of core network and technology solutions, CenturyLink. "This gives customers even more flexibility for how they leverage their cloud workloads. Our robust global network and the self-service features of Dynamic Connections combine to deliver secure, reliable and scalable connectivity so enterprises can deliver IT agility with their cloud environments."

E-LAN enhances CenturyLink’s E-Services that provide point-to-point, point-to multi-point and multi-point network configurations. The services are MEF CE 2.0-certified and available in nearly 300 markets for on-net and off-net retail and wholesale customers.

CenturyLink’s E-LAN can be used to connect multiple locations across Ethernet-enabled markets globally, regionally or in a single metro location. It leverages SDN capable network components and can be easily configured with CenturyLink Cloud Connect Dynamic Connections, Dynamic Capacity and Enhanced Management solutions, allowing enterprise networks to respond to business-specific connection needs in real time. E-LAN also supports single and multi-Class of Service (CoS) options for flexibility of network design to help support the demands of a customer’s data applications.

CenturyLink's network includes approximately 450,000 global route miles of fiber, with services in more than 60 countries and more than 150,000 on-net buildings, including connectivity to more than 2,200 public and private data centers across the globe.

Monday, May 6, 2019

CenturyLink is expanding its partnership with Google Cloud, enabling it to combine a leading public cloud, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), with CenturyLink IT consulting services.

By joining the Google Cloud Partner Program, CenturyLink said it will be able to provide implementation, sales and technical support to enterprises as they accelerate innovation with cloud solutions. CenturyLink has established a Google Cloud center of excellence with certified Google Cloud Architects and Engineers who are highly skilled in cloud infrastructure, networking, migration and managed services.

“Our work with CenturyLink is a prime example of our fast-growing cloud ecosystem and Google Cloud’s commitment to support the technology needs of enterprises today,” said Carolee Gearhart, vice president of Worldwide Channel Sales at Google Cloud. “We look forward to continuing to expand our partnership with CenturyLink, which brings a wealth of expertise in SAP consulting, big data analytics and secure private networking to public and hybrid cloud workloads.”

“This partnership enables global enterprises to leverage the power of CenturyLink’s diverse global network combined with our innovative thought leadership in optimizing application deployment and advanced IT services that help meet the full range of their hybrid cloud needs,” said Mahesh Dalvi, vice president, Global IT Solutions and Managed Services, CenturyLink. “Both Google Cloud and CenturyLink are highly focused on tackling complex enterprise needs, including the optimization of critical workloads such as SAP and Big Data.”

"AT&T provides organizations globally with secure, smart solutions, and our work to bring Google Cloud's portfolio of products, services and tools to every layer of its customers' business helps

Wednesday, May 1, 2019

CenturyLink Private Cloud on VMware Cloud Foundation is now available on Dell EMC PowerEdge servers.

CenturyLink said it is delivering a complete software-defined data center (SDDC) solution based on the Dell Technologies stack – combining Dell EMC PowerEdge servers with the VMware Cloud Foundation software architecture into a fully automated and fully-managed service.

CenturyLink Private Cloud is available in 31 hosting locations on four continents.

"As our customers continue on their digital transformation journeys, it is common to find workloads that don’t fit in the public cloud, yet still require reliable automation, simple operations, and resilient data protection,” said David Shacochis, vice president of Hybrid IT product management, CenturyLink. “With this new capability, we continue to give customers more ways to tap into the power of the software-defined data center while staying connected to a range of hybrid cloud venues through our adaptive, global fiber network."

Thursday, April 4, 2019

CenturyLink is working with Streamroot, a provider of peer-to-peer networking solutions, to offer a global mesh delivery platform for bandwidth-heavy streamed content.

CenturyLink's new mesh delivery platform intelligently sources video content from both a CDN and a mesh network of devices watching the same stream. This allows for rapid scalability and resiliency, even within hard-to-reach markets.

"Streamroot's work with CenturyLink demonstrates once more that the future of OTT streaming belongs to hybrid delivery," said Pierre-Louis Theron, CEO and Co-Founder of Streamroot. "The combination of CenturyLink's world-class CDN with Streamroot's proven peer-to-peer technology provides broadcasters a robust and scalable OTT delivery solution, and ushers in a new standard for large-scale video delivery to audiences around the world."

CenturyLink's CDN:

Delivered ~42.8 exabytes of data globally in 2018.

Answered 74.4 trillion requests globally for content like videos or photos in 2018.

Wednesday, February 13, 2019

CenturyLink reported revenue of $5.78 billion for the fourth quarter of 2018, compared to $6.01 billion for the fourth quarter of 2017 on a pro forma basis. Diluted loss per share was ($2.26) for the fourth quarter of 2018, compared to diluted earnings per share of $1.06 for pro forma fourth quarter 2017. There was a non-cash goodwill impairment charge for the consumer business of $2.726 billion in the fourth quarter of 2018.

In addition, CenturyLink's Board of Directors announced plans to reduce the company's annual dividend to $1.00 from $2.16, beginning with the Board's next dividend declaration.

"CenturyLink's focus on disciplined execution in 2018 enabled us to make significant progress integrating Level 3, including achieving our originally announced synergy target more than two years earlier than expected," said Jeff Storey, president and CEO of CenturyLink. "In 2019, we are shifting our focus from integration to transformation. We are focused on profitable revenue growth in our business markets and believe the scope and scale of our global assets, along with our innovative product portfolio, position us to succeed."

"In addition to this focus on growth, we are shifting our capital allocation priorities and reducing the annual dividend to $1.00 from the current $2.16. Strong business fundamentals allow us to make the important decision to lower our leverage target to 2.75x to 3.25x Net Debt to Adjusted EBITDA and accelerate our timeframe to reach that target, while still returning significant cash to shareholders and continuing to invest in revenue and EBITDA growth initiatives."

On a conference call, CenturyLink disclosed plans to raise its CAPEX spending by approximately $500 million to expand its fiber networks, enhance its enterprise portfolio, etc.

Friday, December 28, 2018

Beginning on December 27 at around 10am MST CenturyLink was hit by a widespread outage impacting consumer and businesses across the United States. Numerous communities reported a loss of 911 service. Businesses reported a loss of mission-critical cloud services. Residential customers complained about the loss of broadband connectivity.

On Friday evening, more than 24 hours after the outage began, CenturyLink reported via Twitter that all consumer services impacted by the event, including voice and 911, were restored as of December 28 at 7:30pm Mountain Standard Time.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai described the outage as unacceptable and called for a formal investigation into the matter: "“When an emergency strikes, it’s critical that Americans are able to use 911 to reach those who can help. The CenturyLink service outage is therefore completely unacceptable, and its breadth and duration are particularly troubling. I’ve directed the Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau to immediately launch an investigation into the cause and impact of this outage. This inquiry will include an examination of the effect that CenturyLink’s outage appears to have had on other providers’ 911 services. I have also spoken with CenturyLink to underscore the urgency of restoring service immediately. We will continue to monitor this situation closely to ensure that consumers’ access to 911 is restored as quickly as possible.”

This MEF 3.0 Implementation POC demonstration shows multiple MEF 3.0 LSO APIs and TAPI Connectivity, Topology, and Notification APIs working collaboratively to illustrate automated service orchestration, fulfillment, and assurance for MEF 3.0 Subscriber Layer 1 Connectivity Services in an Ethernet/OTN overlay/underlay multi-technology, multi-layer, multi-domain network. This is in support of bandwidth-on-demand and dynamic restoration use cases.

The PoC demonstrates the power of applying generic network abstraction concepts such as constraint, forwarding, and termination to control, manage, and orchestrate multi-technology, multi-layer, multi-vendor domains in a consistent manner. This is done using a common API framework – including the MEF LSO Presto Network Resource Provisioning (NRP) API that is built on top of the ONF Transport API framework – to provision and control L2/L1/L0 transport network resources in support of corresponding MEF 3.0 services. The PoC also incorporates LSO Interlude, LSO Allegro, and LSO Adagio APIs.

This PoC focuses on how to build artificial intelligence and cognitive analysis into the network in order to enable complex networks to be managed automatically.

The PoC demonstrates alignment with existing LSO Presto API and emerging LSO Allegro API work. In addition, this PoC provides a jump-start for future LSO Interface Profile specification, LSO API/SDK, and micro-service development in support of service assurance functionality.

Monday, November 12, 2018

CenturyLink and Infinera are collaborating to deliver multi-terabit capacity for connecting SCinet, the dedicated high-capacity network at the SC18 conference at the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center in Dallas, with wide area networks in several cities, including Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, Seattle, Sunnyvale and Washington, D.C.

Specifically, this year’s SCinet leverages the CenturyLink core optical transport network and the Infinera XT-3600 platform, powered by the fourth-generation Infinite Capacity Engine (ICE4), to deliver super-channel-based terabit capacity to the conference site. At the Infinera booth during SC18, Infinera and CenturyLink are also using the XT Series platform and Infinera’s Xceed Multi-layer SDN Platform to demonstrate a software-defined networking (SDN) solution featuring real-time telemetry performance monitoring data streaming to automatically detect and dynamically respond to network issues using predefined network policies.

“A scalable, agile and low-latency infrastructure plays a critical role in addressing the demanding and ever-increasing connectivity requirements of high-performance computing and the global research and education community,” said Andrew Dugan, Chief Technology Officer at CenturyLink. “We are pleased to work closely with Infinera to deliver terabit-scale capacity for SCinet, underscoring our commitment to serving the needs of these customers.”

“Our collaboration with CenturyLink at SC18 highlights our leadership role in delivering the most advanced optical transport networking solutions capable of pushing the boundaries of innovation in network speed, efficiency and automation,” said Bob Jandro, Senior Vice President, Worldwide Sales at Infinera.

Thursday, November 1, 2018

Andrew Dugan, SVP Technology Planning & Network Architecture, CenturyLink says it is vital to understand that customers are undergoing transformations of their own. Enterprise applications are getting distributed into multiple clouds. Some workloads stay in private data centers and others are moved into hybrid or public clouds. Carriers, like CenturyLink, must provide networking services that are equally as dynamic as the service offered by cloud providers.

CenturyLink is developing products that allow for dynamic service creation. This allows for new connections to be set-up, capacity to be scaled, and VLANs to be controlled.

Another area of interest is MEF's LSO (lifecycle service orchestration) APIs for enabling dynamic services across carriers to public clouds. CenturyLink is heavily supporting MEF's efforts in this area.

Enterprise transformation is a big part of ongoing work at MEF, says Adam Saenger, Vice President of Networking Solutions at CenturyLink.

Enterprises are increasingly using software-defined networking to power hybrid clouds. CenturyLink is working hard on the orchestration of these functions so that customers can move "at the speed of enterprises" and not at the speed of telecom.

CenturyLink first introduced dynamic capacity in its network seven years ago. Over the past 12 months, it has added capabilities such as dynamic VLAN management spanning into cloud environments. Most recently, CenturyLink announced global availability of SD-WAN, and dynamic connections on demand to cloud resources.

Tuesday, October 9, 2018

CenturyLink launched a new Cloud Connect Dynamic Connections service that enables real-time creation and deletion of private Ethernet connections to cloud service providers. Customers can now dynamically connect across hybrid cloud workloads including their private cloud and data center locations, as well as within a cloud provider such as Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS GovCloud (U.S.) is also included in the connectivity options.

Cloud Connect Dynamic Connections enables customers to self-provision the connections on-demand through a secure portal or via API integration. The connections is delivered over private MEF Carrier Ethernet 2.0 connections across CenturyLink's redundant global fiber network of more than 2,200 public and private data centers and over 100,000 on-net enterprise buildings to cloud service providers across the globe. Billing works on a pay-as-you-go model. Every dynamic connection is on an hourly rate with no long-term contract and no early termination fees.

"CenturyLink can now provide on-demand, real-time network connections between enterprise locations, public data centers and cloud service providers across the globe," said Paul Savill, senior vice president of core network and technology solutions at CenturyLink. "This also demonstrates how CenturyLink's global network and hybrid cloud management solutions make the cloud ecosystem easier for enterprises to leverage. Our on-net customers can now enjoy a network experience that matches their cloud experience—wherever they operate."

Wednesday, August 8, 2018

CenturyLink reported revenue of $5.90 billion for the second quarter 2018, compared to $6.04 billion for the second quarter 2017 on a pro forma basis. Diluted earnings per share was $0.27 for the second quarter 2018, compared to diluted earnings per share of $0.06 for the second quarter 2017.

Total revenues declined 2.1%
Business revenues declined 1.6%
Consumers revenues declined 4.0%
The total number of consumer broadband customers was 4,906,000

"Our continued progress on integration efforts contributed to a solid quarter, with strong growth in Adjusted EBITDA and Free Cash Flow," said Jeff Storey, president and CEO of CenturyLink. "Across the company, we are focused on profitable growth and providing a better experience for our customers and employees."

Wednesday, July 25, 2018

In terms of network services, customers want simplicity and agility to transform their own businesses. MEF 3.0 presents a massive opportunity to standardize the automation of services, says Aamir Hussain, EVP and CTO, CenturyLink.